Finebaum On Playing Without Fans: "I Think It Would Be the End of College Football as We Know It."

With having spectators in attendance being seemingly off the table in the near future, everyone's focus has shifted to finding ways to potentially play games — in every sport — solely for television audiences. College and professional football would probably be the weirdest to watch with nobody in the stands, but if that's what it takes to have football, I think everyone would jump at it.

However, Paul Finebaum raises an interesting point. Despite everyone in America accepting the highest levels of college football as a professional sport in amateurism's clothing, the NCAA remains steadfast in its assuredness that the players you will see drafted in next week's NFL Draft after leaving college early to become multi-millionaires were only just a couple months ago student-athletes.

So if schools deem it unsafe to bring back all students in the fall, but bring back just the football players so they can still at least play the games on the schedule and get the television revenue to save the athletic departments, the "student-athlete" argument becomes untenable pretty quickly. You can't say these kids are students first and then have them be the only ones on campus just to play 12 football games — four or five of which they would have to get on a plane to travel to.

Maybe this could actually end up being some sort of a positive in that it could finally make the NCAA just give up its charade and give us the college football we want while compensating the players who deserve to be able to make the same money off their own names anyone else in this country can. And the schools are in an no-win situation, because they don't want to play with no fans, but they have admitted the results of missing just one football season would be catastrophic. Nobody even really knows how many sports would have to be cut, but athletic departments would be in shambles.

Maybe this idea of a season starting in February to allow the possibility of fans gains some traction, but that has its whole other set of issues which would cause controversy and athletic directors don't really seem keen on that idea, either.

I don't know. This whole thing sucks. Just please find a way to play college football.